Second Hand SmokeDaily News Op-Ed

by Sidney Zion

There is nothing more powerful than a lie whose time has come.
Throughout history tyrants understood this, and so worked up the populace. In
this bloodiest of centuries we've seen it all-from Hitler to McCarthyism.

And now we have the truth about the anti-smoking fascists. Last
week, a Federal judge wiped out the entire basis of all this business about the
danger of second hand smoke, a lie that has transformed
our culture from saloons to our homes.

In a devastating 94 page opinion, Judge
William Osteen put the cat to the Environmental Protection Agency. These
ideological hustlers are responsible for all the madness we've experienced
since 1993, when, without a scintilla of evidence, they declared that second
hand smoke causes cancer.

This "finding" created civil war in America. Suddenly, it wasn't
just the smoker who was endangered-it was the person at the next table, even
the tenant in the next apartment and the guy sitting next to you at Yankee
Stadium. Common sense should have put this into the garbage pail. If second
hand smoke killed, we'd all be dead, especially everyone who is in newspapers -
a veritable smoke screen in the old days.

Even the media mavens, who knew better, bought the lie and sold
it to the public. The audience was there and the hit men in the EPA knew
it.

They had no proof but what they had was a new America, a people
that made health the be-all. Gyms instead of saloons, diets instead of
burgers.

And, of course, the tobacco industry becomes the pariah, a
criminal element, against which everything is possible.

But it was not enough to get the smoker. To change the world, the
culture, you had to hit their innocent victims-the receivers of second hand
smoke.

Web

smokingaloud.com

The EPA was the ready, helped by Hillary Clinton, whose first
edict as First Lady, was a no smoking rule in the White House.

The EPA announced that 3000 people died every year from second
hand smoke. More people die from milk, not to mention bird droppings in
national forests.

But the Yuppie audience was ready to buy, and the market went
through the roof.

In New York, Peter Vallone and Rudy Giuliani banned smoking
everywhere but in bars. Yankee Stadium and Shea were out-although even the EPA
never went beyond indoor smoking.

"Secondary smoke is one of the leading causes of death," Giuliani
announced as he lit up his cigar. At the moment that the Congressional Research
Service, an independent arm of Congress said there were no scientific basis for
the EPA's report.

In March, the World Health Organization was caught with the lie.
It is the SS of the Nicotine Nazis. The WHO ran a multi million dollar study
dedicated to proving that passive smoke causes
cancer. It came up empty.

The media censored that story. If you didn't read it in my column
you don't know it. And now the media do virtually the same thing with Judge
Osteen's opinion.

Osteen found as follows: "EPA publicly committed to conclusion
before the research had begun: adjusted established procedure and scientific
norms to validate its conclusion, and aggressively utilized its authority to
disseminate findings to establish a defacto regulatory scheme to influence
public opinion."

In other words, the government lied. And in response the
government says, "People should understand that second hand smoke is a real
health risk.

It's as if Ted Turner announced about the discredited CNN report
on nerve gas, "We stand by our story." The difference here is that the media
stand with the lie, whose time, alas, remains.